Does what it says on the tin.
Mainly people doing things.
A 24 hour timelapse showing the passing of weather over London, to the accompaniment of Moby's beautiful Homeward Angel. A collaboration with Paul Grundy for Almacantar.
My instagram feed - @samueljbland.
A document of an unusual journey through England: a 500-mile walk from the South coast to the far North. I walked and only walked, avoiding all vehicular transport.
A small selection of the images presented here.
The fabulous Whinnie Williams pops out for a pint of milk and performs a mashup of Destiny's Child's Bills Bills Bills and Francoise Hardy's Le Temps de l'Amour. In her local barbers.
A selection of my favourite single images from a range of stories and projects not shown elsewhere on this site.
Mazí Mas is a roaming restaurant in London, providing employment opportunities to refugee and migrant women. We spoke with the women of this incredible team about what the work means to them and why their food is not to be missed. Find out more about this extraordinary labour of love at mazimas.co.uk.
Selection of commercial work of locations, buildings, landscapes and cityscapes.
Zahra Ash-Harper and Renée LaCroix, co-founders of slow fashion label Antithesis, speak about how their unique vision has influenced their designs and the way they've built up their company.
Googlology is my first collaboration with a piece of software. It is a playful exploration of that section of the digital photographic vernacular currently indexed by Google.
Google Goggles is a visual search tool for mobile phone platforms. It allows users to take a photograph of an object or scene, which the application then analyses with the aim of identifying the content of the image and providing information about it. However, Goggles often fails to identify the subject, and in these cases it provides twelve images from the Google index, which it deems to be similar. Since it can only analyse the images mathematically, this selection is based solely on pixel colour and structure; the pictures are divorced completely from their content or meaning in the completely democratic ‘eyes’ of Goggles. So a news image of a nuclear missile launch in Pakistan is analysed and presented next to a stock photograph of a bottle of pills and a painting of a small boy wearing a blue hoodie.
The resulting selection of images is wonderfully eclectic, and sometimes strangely moving in its fragmentary and multifarious glimpse of human culture.
I was fascinated by this, and so decided to reverse-engineer the original image as closely as possible, as a collage from the resulting twelve ‘similar images’ that are presented when Goggles cannot identify the subject of the picture.
This project is both a portrait of a specific place and a wider meditation on the continual modification by man of his environment.
On the edge of Redhill in Surrey lies an area of land of approximately 0.6 square miles, formerly the site of two sand quarries, now containing a landfill, a nature reserve and a new housing estate. These three very different environments are all commonplace in 21st Century Britain but seeing them in such close proximity to one another is unusual and creates a surreal landscape of strange juxtapositions.
The presence of the landfill in particular, easily visible on the side of a hill and often smellable from a mile away, starkly renders apparent an area of modern life often hidden from view – the continual piling up of consumer waste. The fact that this mountain of rubbish looms over a nature reserve of lake and marsh, immediately opposite a brand-new housing development, creates a discomforting vision of the contemporary environment. The juxtaposition of materials at both ends of their consumer-use lifespan is particularly thought provoking.
The project is presented as a series of folding triptych prints, reflecting the tripartite nature of the area, and creating a series of links and contrasts through juxtaposition.
A series of still life studies of animal carcasses that have perished in human-constructed environments.
A day in the life of New York, shot and edited entirely on a handheld iPhone 6, as a side project when I was in New York at the end of 2014. I decided as an experiment to see what I could make using only the phone, no accessories, lenses, tripods etc., just my hands and the phone itself. I did make use of the street furniture around me on occasion. I edited it using iOS8 iMovie and a couple of grading apps. It's not technically perfect, but pretty amazing what you can do with a phone now compared to a few years ago.